In her spare time, Emma Meehan channels her competitive spirit into weightlifting, gaining firsthand experience with the challenges of fitness training. Besides being a competitive athlete, Meehan is a certified personal trainer, a software engineer, and the founder of Precision Sports Technology. This innovative company has created an app designed to enhance fitness training performance and minimize injury risks.
“I was in the gym brainstorming ideas for my final-year college project when I noticed my squat technique was off in the mirror,” Meehan recalls. “It made me wonder why there wasn’t technology available to correct this issue without needing a personal trainer for every session.”
Meehan's curiosity led her to develop an initial prototype for her college project. Encouraged by her supervisors, she considered turning her idea into a startup.
Before diving into entrepreneurship, Meehan sought industry experience, joining Cisco Systems in Oranmore as a development engineer for Webex, Cisco’s web conferencing solution. Over nearly four years, she balanced her full-time job with weekend work on the Precision Sports app.
Since leaving Cisco to focus on her business, Meehan has worked tirelessly to refine her product. The app is set to undergo trials with eight potential customer groups, including private gyms, personal trainers, physiotherapy clinics, elite sports teams, and academic sports science research institutions across Galway, Donegal, Kerry, Waterford, and Dublin.
“Currently, strength and conditioning coaches and personal trainers spend hours manually analyzing training videos. There’s no solution that offers real-time feedback on an athlete’s movements or provides coaches with quantifiable insights,” Meehan explains.
The Precision Sports app ↗ addresses this gap by leveraging 3D camera technology to offer real-time feedback and analysis of exercise movements. It uses the 3D cameras integrated into smartphones or connected to laptops. When the app is active, it displays a series of colored dots on the body, based on a traffic light system focusing on joints. If a joint moves out of alignment, an alert is triggered.
After a workout, the session data is automatically uploaded to a dashboard, accessible by physiotherapists, fitness coaches, or personal trainers. This enables them to monitor progress and make necessary adjustments to exercise routines.
To refine her business concept, Meehan participated in the NDRC’s pre-accelerator at the Portershed innovation hub in Galway and completed Enterprise Ireland’s New Frontiers program for startups.
Recently, Meehan secured a €50,000 investment from Enterprise Ireland through the competitive start fund and aims to raise over €1 million by the end of 2023 to finalize, scale, and commercialize the product internationally.
“We’re launching phase one in sports science research institutions this semester for data collection and to build our machine learning algorithms. Next, we’ll develop the AI model to ensure it’s effective for all genders, body types, and ages,” Meehan states.